I didn’t know what it was going to do to me…going back and reading all of it. I didn’t know that it would make me feel the cracks of pressure. I didn’t know that these pressure cracks would continue to split me open. I didn’t know that it would bring tears to my eyes…that there was still so much feeling there…that I would feel that all to familiar feeling of barbed steel running through my veins and through my neck. It ripped me open more than I am now.

That’s where the light began to pour out.

I didn’t know that answering this calling, this dream, this desire to step in front of a microphone would bring all these things out in me. I choked on my own voice today. I wasn’t just reading these posts from all those years back…I was feeling them with every single cell in my body. Time and time again goosebumps and shivers ran all throughout my body and I felt consumed by all of these words that I had written such a long time ago.

It brought me right back into the past. The tapestries of my past unraveled and revealed themselves in full color right in front of me…and there I was, tears in my eyes not being able to read the paper in front of me. I had to stop and come back to reading over and over again. I didn’t know this would happen. I didn’t know there was still so much there.

What scared me for a moment was that I knew that I had 1190 posts left to read. I had almost 5 years left to go through. I knew that this was only the beginning of the things that I had experienced and there was plenty more mixed emotions to come.

I believe in myself and that I can finish this journey, but I struggled to begin today. I struggled to put myself post after post in front of that microphone and pour myself out. Writing these words…they have a specific feel about them. They allow me to get things out. But speaking it brought it all to life. Actually saying the words made me feel and experience things that I have never felt before.

Today, my past came alive. That story, the beginning, the start of all of this was real for those moments that I spoke into that microphone. It was exhausting, but it was exhilarating at the same time. It rattled me, but it also brought something out in me today that has been waiting to come out for a long long time. Maybe, since the beginning of all of this?

I will never know.

But what I do know is that today marked the beginning of something new. Something that I feel in my bones can be even more powerful and more impactful that what has been written down here over the past 5 years.

Today I let my voice out for everyone to hear.

And as much as that scared the crap out of me in the past, the reality is, I went for it again. I’ve been going for it over and over again and something in my life has changed to where that’s a real possibility for me now. To just keep going for it.

Tomorrow is a new day.

Tomorrow is a new opportunity.

I can do this.

Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project